Pakistan: A Hard Country (24 page)

The Taleban meanwhile have been led into violent attacks on the shrines of saints and on the pir families who are descended from the saints. They and their al ies have attacked Barelvi religious leaders who have condemned them and opposed their takeover of particular mosques. For example, on 12 June 2009 they assassinated a leading Barelvi cleric of Lahore, Mufti Sarfraz Naeemi, who had spoken out against them, and in 2005 had issued an edict against suicide bombings. On 1 July 2010 suicide bombers carried out a massive attack on the famous and beloved shrine of the saint Data Ganj Baksh in Lahore (see below), kil ing dozens of worshippers and galvanizing Barelvi religious figures into an unusual display of united protest.

Taleban attacks on shrines are motivated partly by religious hostility.

The Wahabis have been bitterly opposed to shrines since their very beginnings in the eighteenth century, and first leapt to international notoriety when they captured Mecca and Medina and destroyed the shrines and tombs there, not sparing even that of the Prophet himself.

Particular hatred between Wahabis and Shia dates back to the Wahabis’ sack of the great Shia shrines of Karbala, Iraq, in 1802. In Saudi Arabia today, shrines continue to be banned and Sufi orders persecuted.

Taleban hostility to the shrines also stems from the role played by these families in the local elites, which means that the Taleban have to attack and destroy them in order to seize local power. However, as of 2010, the evidence suggests that far from gaining wider support, these attacks have in fact alienated large numbers of people who were initial y attracted by the Pakistani Taleban’s support for the jihad in Afghanistan, advocacy of the Shariah and actions against local criminals. As I was told by people I interviewed on the street in Peshawar in the summer of 2009, among Pathans this was especial y true of the Taleban bomb attack on 5 March 2009 which damaged the Peshawar shrine of the Pathan saint Pir Rahman Baba (Abdur Rahman Mohmand, 1653 – 1711 CE), who like a number of Sufi saints is revered not only for his spiritual power but as a poet of the local vernacular language and has been cal ed the ‘Pashto nightingale’. Data Ganj Baksh too is beloved by Punjabis and indeed by Muslims al over South Asia.

The attacks on these shrines was therefore a mistaken strategy, which some other Taleban were clever enough to avoid. Thus at the shrine of Pir Haji Sahib Taurangyi in the Mohmand Tribal Agency (some of whose descendants wil be described in a later chapter), the local Taleban were careful not to attack the shrine but to co-opt it, stressing that the saint had been a leader of jihad against the British Raj just as the Taleban were fighting the British and Americans invaders and oppressors in Afghanistan, and their ‘slaves’ in the Pakistani government.

SAINTLY POLITICIANS

In attacking the saints, the Islamist extremists – though they refuse to recognize this themselves – are striking at the very roots of Islam in South Asia. One might say that the beginnings of South Asian Islam were the Book and the Saint. In principle the Saint was the bearer of the Book, but in practice it often did not work out quite like that. The Book is of course the Koran, and to a lesser extent the hadiths, or traditional statements and judgments of the Prophet and stories concerning him, recorded (or invented) and more or less codified by early generations of Muslim scholars.

The Koran is the absolute, unquestionable foundation of Islam, and since Islam’s earliest years every movement seeking to reform Islam from within has been ‘scripturalist’, or ‘fundamentalist’ in the sense of emphasizing a return to the pure spirit of the Koran, just as Christian fundamentalists (for whom the term was coined in the nineteenth century, by the way), have sought to do in the case of the Bible.

The saints were the Muslim preacher-missionaries, mostly from the tradition loosely cal ed ‘Sufi’ (a very complex and often misleading term). In South Asia, the saints are known by the Arab term shaikh, and they and their descendants by the Persian one pir (old man). As much as the great Muslim conquering dynasties, the saints actual y spread Islam to many of the ordinary people of South Asia, just as, thousands of miles away, their equivalents were doing in Morocco and elsewhere.

In the process, they, their shrines and their cults took on many local Hindu features, which made them beloved of the local population, but intensely suspect to fundamentalists. The latter have also long accused the cult of the saints of involving shirk, or the worship of figures other than the one God – perhaps the worst sin in the entire Islamic theological canon. Nonetheless, most of the population, especial y in the countryside, came to see the saints as embodying the only Islam they knew. Moreover, the saints were usual y from families claiming to be descendants of the Prophet (Sayyids), and in some cases had themselves come directly from the Arab world. This gave them immense prestige as bearers of Islam from its source, which continues to this day.

The local and decidedly non-Koranic aspects of the saints’ cults were due not only to the influence of the surrounding Hindu world. They have also reflected what seems to be a feature of almost every human society at one time or another, namely a desire for accessible sacred intermediaries between the human individual and his or her supreme, unknowable God. The Arabic phrase usual y translated into English as ‘saint’ literal y means ‘friend of God’. In the words of an early twentieth-century British officer: The general idea of our riverain folk [the traditional settled rural Muslim population of Punjab, which had to live near the rivers to draw water for irrigation] seems to be that the Deity is a busy person, and that his hal of audience is of limited capacity. Only a certain proportion of mankind can hope to attain to the presence of God; but when certain individuals have got there, they may have opportunities of representing the wishes and desires of other members of the human race. Thus, al human beings require an intervener between them and God.3

The legends of the early saints contain many stories of their battles with Hindu priests and kings, in which their superior powers prevail, the priests are routed and the kings defeated in battle or converted. Most of what is now Pakistan was converted to Islam only very slowly, however, and long after it was conquered by Muslim dynasties.

In the words of the great scholar of South Asian Islam, Francis Robinson:

The holy men were ... the pioneers and frontiersmen of the Muslim world, men who from the thirteenth century played the crucial role in drawing new peoples, pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, Shamanists, into an Islamic cultural milieu.

According to tradition, nine saints introduced Islam to Java; wandering holy men, we are told, first brought Islam to West Africa. What the holy men did, it appears, was to find points of contact and social roles within the host community. They shared their knowledge of religious experience with men of other spiritual traditions. They helped propitiate the supernatural forces which hemmed in and always seemed to threaten the lives of common folk. They interpreted dreams, brought rain, healed the sick and made the barren fertile. They mediated between rulers and ruled, natives and newcomers, weak and strong. 4

Stories of miracles grew up, first around the saints and then around their tombs and, as in the Christian world of the Middle Ages, the tombs became shrines (khanqahs) and places of pilgrimage, where people hoped to benefit from access to the saint’s baraka (barkat), or spiritual power. The death anniversaries or urs of the saints (from the Persian word for marriage, commemorating their ‘marriage’ with God at death) became great ‘fairs’. As with Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras, the langars (free kitchens) attached to the shrines play an important part in feeding the local poor, as wel as pilgrims.

Muslim Pakistan, like Hindu India, is bound together by pilgrimages and al egiances to shrines and saints which stretch across provincial and linguistic boundaries. These bonds can be traced visual y by the sayings and symbols of particular saints which often form part of the wonderful y extravagant decoration of the lorries which cross the country from one end to another, creating a ‘sacred geography’ that spans the whole of Pakistan. 5 Sufism and the shrines play a very important part in the popular poetry of local languages, above al in Sindh – where the saint Abdul Latif of Bhit is regarded as Sindh’s national poet – but also in Punjabi and Pashto.

The culture of the shrines thus permeates Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sometimes presented himself to his fol owers as a divinely inspired guide and teacher, as does Altaf Hussain of the MQM (cal ed by his fol owers ‘Pir Sahib’). The mausoleum of Zalfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir near Larkana is consciously model ed on the shrine of a saint. At PPP ral ies, I have seen party supporters shaking their heads violently from side to side in the manner of ecstatic devotees at saintly festivals. Saints have also been pressed into military service. During the 1965 war with India, stories circulated of saints catching Indian bombs in their hands.

As in the Christian world, the shrines grew wealthy on the strength of donations from pilgrims and, above al , land grants from monarchs, noblemen and tribes. However, in the Muslim world there is a crucial difference from that of Christianity (at least since the Catholic Church in the eleventh century began to insist successful y that priests and bishops could not marry): namely, that unlike Christian saints, most Muslim saints married and had children, and that in the world of Muslim saints spiritual power is hereditary. This power ‘is distributed among al the progeny of the saint and harnessed by the few who fulfil religious obligations and meditate on the tomb of the saint in order to perform miracles’.6

Not just the shrines themselves, but the pir families of the sajjada nashins (literal y, ‘he who sits on the prayer carpet’) who were their guardians therefore became major landowners, exercising both religious and spiritual power in their neighbourhoods; sometimes performing miracles, often mediating local disputes and interceding with rulers, and occasional y going to war. They attracted whole local tribes as adherents and defenders, and intermarried with other Sayyid families to form powerful networks of kinship and patronage. Once again, in Pakistan it is not wealth alone, but wealth plus either kinship or spiritual prestige, or both, that gives political power.

The shrines and their guardians have therefore always vastly outclassed in prestige the menial and often despised vil age mul ah, just as the shrines and monasteries of medieval Europe cast the humble vil age priest deep into the shade. The power of the pirs in Sindh and southern Punjab, and their role in combating the Taleban in the Pathan regions, wil be discussed in later chapters.

These pir families remain of immense political importance in much of Pakistan, and especial y in the PPP; as witness the fact that, as of 2010, the Prime Minister, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani; deputy prime minister, Makhdoom Amin Fahim; foreign minister, Syed Mahmood Qureshi; and minister for religion, Syed Ahmed Qazmi are al from pir lineages, as are leading party supporters like Syeda Abida Husain.

However, members of pir lineages are also to be found in prominent positions in other mainstream parties, like Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat of the PML(Q) and Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, Makhdoom Ahmed Mehmood and, greatest of al , the Pir Pagaro of Sindh, al of whom at the time of writing are supporting the PML(N).

Thus, back in 1988, a PPP politician from the family of the pir of Hadda in Sindh, Syed Parvez Jil ani, recounted to me the legends of Hadda, including one which told how the fish of the River Indus would come to worship his cousin the pir (a legend presumably taken original y from the worship of a Hindu river-god). He described the absolute, unquestioning devotion of the murids of Hadda to the pir and his family. Then, as a good PPP politician, he added: The difference between us and the other pirs is that we are in favour of bringing education to our murids, and that we have always played a democratic role – we were always for the PPP.

That is why the defeat of the Pir Pagaro does not worry us. Our people would never betray us, because we have always worked with the masses and spoken for the rights of the poor. And we have always spoken out on Sindhi issues.7

The point is of course that, as this interview clearly indicates, in practice the pirs and their families cannot genuinely advance either local education or local democracy, as this would strike directly at the cultural and social bases of their own power. This brings out again the tragic tension in Pakistan between the needs of modern progress and the needs of social and political stability. The traditions and structures which prevent Islamist revolution and civil war also help keep much of the population in a state of backwardness and deference to the elites.

As these particular PPP pir families also demonstrate, they play a very valuable role in bridging the Sunni – Shia divide and hindering the rise of sectarian extremism. These pir families are publicly Sunni, but are general y known to be in private largely Shia (like the Bhuttos and Zardaris). Many saints, their traditions and their descendants in Pakistan are therefore not bound by the Sunni – Shia divide, but can be Sunni, Shia, or something undefined in between. This makes them very different from the Islamic scholars and judges of the towns, whose entire tradition is concentrated on precise learning and the drawing of precise distinctions on the basis of written sources.